Battle
Battle System, By Connor MacLeod, January 2013 The 3 (Nearly-Equal) Factors Of Battle #Army Size #Army Bonuses (Knights, Research, & Special Items) #Troop Distribution Army Size The larger army wins of course. The maximum benefit is achieved when the winning army approaches twice the size of the losing army. The benefit from the size advantage typically pushes the Kill-to-Death ratio to 3:2. Army Bonuses There are three types of bonuses that play into the battle: #Research Levels (Poisoned Edge & Healing Potions) # The Knight's Bonus # Special Items (Barkskin & Blood Lust) The Knight's Bonus Against an even sized army, a high level knight can achieve a Kill-to-Death ratio of almost 3:1. Troop Distribution Each troop type is strong against one other type and weak against the third. To leverage this advantage, we need to keep in mind that tier 1 troops die first, followed by the tier 2 troops, and tier 3 troops die last. The Balanced Distribution A balanced distribution of troop types performs well in all situations. If you have no knowledge of the incoming army, a balanced distribution is optimal. However, this is the only situation where a balanced distribution is optimal. In fact, the performance of the balanced distribution peaks against itself. Any specialized distribution will achieve an advantage against a perfectly balanced distribution. The Specialized Distribution There are 2 rules to follow when creating a specialized distribution: #Your lowest tier should be comprised of a single troop type, counter your opponent's strength. #Stack your army to overcome your enemy's lowest tier troops first. You know what your enemy's strength is. So you want to force them to attack troops that they are weak against. So you can pack your lowest tier with their counter. Also look at their lowest tier. Remember that you must kill these troops first. Against a perfectly balanced army, any specialized army will perform well. All-Infantry, All-Horse, or All-Archers will perform well. Any army where the lowest tier has only one troop type will obtain an advantage. The reason being is that some of the troops in the balanced army do not receive an attack advantage, they are forced to attack troops that they are weak against. Meanwhile the balanced army has all three troop types in its lowest tier, so at the beginning of the battle your troops are receiving the attack advantage. 2 Case Studies: # Attacking a tiny army # Attacking a hopelessly large army Case 1: Wiping your puny opponent off the map. So your opponent is a joke. You're going to win for sure because you've got an enormous army. Do you still need to worry about the knight and troop types? Lets see how much of a difference these two factors make: Here we see that even though we already have the size advantage, the knight's level and the types of troops still make a major impact on the Kill-to-Death ratio. Case 2: Losing the battle, but winning the war. So it's 300 troops versus millions of Persians. You know you are gonna lose ahead of time, but you want to take as many with you as possible. They have the size advantage so they will win the battle, but is it possible to still obtain a positive Kill-to-Death ratio? Here we see that the knight can overcome the size advantage and turn the Kill-to-Death ratio well into the positive. We also still obtain an advantage by attacking with only one troop type. In reality, when attacking a massive force (say your opponent's castle) it will rarely be perfectly balanced, and the bonus from a properly specialized army would be more noticeable.